All posts by reneeinnd

2026, animals, pets, Uncategorized

Developmental Milestones

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Well, Kyrill’s worst fear has been come true: Mitzi can now jump up on the sofa all by herself. For Kyrill, this means that he has lost the “upper paw” he had with her.

Prior to last week, Kyrill could steal any of Mitzi’s toys and chew bones, jump up on the sofa with them, and she couldn’t do much about it. Kyrill and Mitzi both have a “I’ll have what she/he is having” attitude about possessions. They want anything the other has. Now that she can ascend the sofa, she can more easily steal things back from him. We are happy with this developmental milestone since we no longer have to hoist her up all the time. Cesky Terriers are long dogs with short legs, and her back finally got long enough. Kyrill was definitely stressed and needed lots of pets and reassurance after her sofa jumping became regular.

Despite vying for possessions, the two dogs are always close by one another and snooze right next to each other all the time. They remind me of human siblings, with Kyrill taking the role of an older brother who wants to be dominant over his younger sister but who still tries to take care of her.

What sibling rivalry did you experience? How did your family cope with it? If you have more than one pet how do they get along?

2026, Business, Computers, Food, home, Technology, Travel, Uncategorized, work

It Will Be Here When?

19 Comments

It has been a real eye opener moving here from the middle of nowhere on the Northern Plains. The weather here is far more changeable and unpredictable. Pickup trucks are fewer and smaller. Lots more bugs.

Sioux Falls is our “big town ” for shopping. It is only 24 miles away as opposed to Bismarck, our former “big town” that was 100 miles away. Trips to Bismarck were few and far between. Even so, we really don’t want to be running to SF all the time for things we need that we can’t get in Luverne. That means more ordering on-line.

We have been astounded by the speed on-line orders are delivered to us. The other day I ordered some bookends at about 10:00 am. They were delivered by 6:00 pm the same day. Other orders come overnight and are delivered between 5:00 am and 8:00 am. Is this normal? Does this happen elsewhere? I think if folks back in western ND knew this was possible, they would protest the wait times for their deliveries!

I wonder, though, how long deliveries across the country will be quick and speedy. The other day I got an email from a produce company in Oregon I often order celery root and savoy cabbage from. They were offering a $500 bonus to any customer who could recommend a CDL trucker who could deliver their produce. There seems to be a trucker shortage. Hmm. I wonder why?

Do you get orders delivered fast? Tell some delivery stories. Know any truckers?

2026, Family, Food, Travel, Uncategorized

How Far Would You Go?

43 Comments

The other night I got some mushroom ravioli out of the freezer. It was some pasta we moved from ND. It was purchased at our local ND Family Fare store.

The pasta was somewhat remarkable for being imported from Italy. It is a brand that Family Fare regularly stocks. I am not a big mushroom fan, but the pasta was pretty good. Our Boommate thought it was absolutely superb. She loves mushrooms.

It had porcini and champagne mushrooms in the filling. We looked up where we might find the brand, and it is specific to Family Fare. The closest stores to us are in Cannon Falls, Litchfield, and Northfield.

The day after we had the pasta, Boommate drove to St. Cloud for a quilt show. She reported massive construction detours, one of which took her close enough to Litchfield for her to justify a side trip to the Family Fare store. It had the pasta brand, but no mushrooms ravioli. Sigh.

I have made ravioli from scratch in the past, but I don’t think I could replicate the mushroom filling. I admire her determination to get to Litchfield. These days the farthest I drive for things is Sioux Falls.

What is the farthest you have gone to get something you really wanted? Ever made pasta from scratch? How are construction season and detours going for you?

2026, home, Technology, Uncategorized

Fandango

18 Comments

Husband and I have very tall ceilings in our dining room, and kitchen. Most of the lights are recessed. These are the lights in the kitchen:

We haven’t had any bulbs burn out, but when we do I am afraid I will have to phone an electrician to come and change the bulb. We haven’t a tall enough ladder, and I can’t manage heights any longer.

The living room also has a very high ceiling with a large fan that works well to circulate air and keep the house cool. You can see it in the header photo. It is little too rococo for my tastes, and like many appliances in our new home it needed to be repaired. I had the electrician come over on Thursday to fix it. The fan worked, but made an intermittent grinding, scraping noise that was maddening to listen to. Sometimes it was quiet, sometimes it wasn’t. It is also very high up, and there was no way we could check it out ourselves.

The electrician figured out that one of the blades was not flush and was making the scraping noise. He told us it needed a very thin shim to raise it up, and that he would “MacGyver” something to solve the problem. It was quite a process to take the globe and other internal parts off to get to the blade turning mechanism, and he did it while standing atop a very tall ladder. He intended to use a very small, thin piece of wood as a shim. He inadvertently broke off the tip of his screwdriver in his attempt to raise the blade mechanism to put in the shim. To his surprise the metal tip stayed under the blade and was exactly the size shim he needed to keep it from scraping. Now it runs really quietly.

I was able to wash out the glass globe before he reassembled the fan. It hadn’t been cleaned out for a very long time. The electrician couldn’t “MacGyver” how to change the direction the fan blades circled, but at least it is quiet.

What have you had to “MacGyver”? Broke many tools? Got ceiling fans?

2026, animals, gardening, home, News, Uncategorized

Bugs?

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I know. I know. All bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs. I had biology minor in college, and took an invertebrate zoology class where I learned that Rock County, where I currently live, is one of the very few counties in MN where they have termites that actually swarm. In ND, we had very few insects or bugs or other pests in the garden. We had the occasional flea beetle on the cabbagey plants. (I applied Sevin, but hated using a pesticide. ) No aphids. No slugs. None of those cane borers in the raspberries. Cabbage worms were easily dealt with by applying Bascillus Thuringiensis, a natural cabbage worm killer. We had virtually no mosquitoes due to being in a semi arid part of the country.

It has come to my attention that there are more insect/bug pests in MN than I remembered after being away for 50 years. I have had incredibly large carpenter ants in the house, presumably living in the decaying sections of our deck, and drain flies in my bathroom. We are planning how to replace the deck. Boommate has abandoned hopes of a hummingbird feeder due to ants getting into the sweet nectar she put out now on two occasions.. I have not yet seen a mosquito, but I am sure they are coming.

Our vegetables are planted in raised beds and thus far we have had no pest issues. A couple of weeks ago we had a pleasant guy from a pest control company come to the house to offer us pest eradication services for ants, hornets, and other home invasion pests. In the past I would have sent such a guy packing, since I hate the thought of pesticide use, but I engaged his services after finding out many of our neighbors enlist his company’s services. They may know more about potential pests than I currently know, and I don’t want any unpleasant bug surprises in the house.

What advice do you have for me regarding MN garden or house pests? What bug or insect issues have you successfully or not so successfully dealt with?

2026, Art, home, Uncategorized

Lost And Found

23 Comments

One of the more frustrating aspects of moving and unpacking is the tendency I have noticed of my putting things away in places so they won’t get lost, and then forgetting where I put them.

I made certain when we packed up our pictures and wall hangings in ND that the hanging-up hardware was put into sealed bags and accurately labeled. Upon unpacking them in MN I tried to keep the hardware filled bages in one place.

This week I intend to finished hanging up the wall decorations and have done with them. One main thing I wanted to hang is a Zapotec rug. I knew I had the hanging hardware in a marked bag, but do you think I could find it? It wasn’t with any of the other picture hanging hardware. I also knew that neither I nor Husband I would have tossed it out. That meant that I had moved it somewhere for “safe keeping”. Sigh.

I spent much of yesterday going through drawers, arranging and straightening closets and cupboards, and searching any possible place for the rug hardware. I resigned myself to go to the hardware store today to find suitable hanging brackets when, at 5:45, I finally ran across the bag in a bookshelf in the guest room where I intend to hang the rug. I had put the bag there for “safe keeping” but didn’t remeber that I had put it behind a three ring binder. You can see the hardware in the header photo. Today the rug goes up!

When have you lost something after you put it away for safe keeping?

2026, Family, Gatherings, History, Theatre, Uncategorized

Tales From The Grave

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On Saturday, the Rock County Historical Society hosted a program of reenactments of the lives of several people buried in Rock County. One was that of a priest, Father Francis Sampson, buried in Luverne’s Catholic Cemetery. He was known as the Paratrooper Padre, and served as a chaplain with the 101st Screaming Eagles in WWII. He parachuted into Normandy on D-day and was the guy who alerted the top brass that a young soldier had lost several brothers in other engagements and since he was the last of the brothers he should be sent home to their mother. Hence Saving Private Ryan, the movie.

Another compelling story was that of a young woman, Captain Lenore Hansen, from Hills (about 15 miles from Luverne and buried in the Hills Cemetery) who was one of the first women allowed to enlist into the Marines in 1945. She worked with the Navaho Code Talkers. She was noted for her really good memory, and memorized over 200 Navaho words, and was involved in creating English words for which there were no counterparts in Navaho. Thus, the Navaho words for Iron and fish were combined to represent “submarine”. She never told her family what she had done in the war. She became a special education teacher in Rochester, MN. She is said to have not told her family about what she did in the war since it was considered classified information.

I think it would be really fun to be a reenactor in these scenarios. It is really wonderful to know about the people who lived and are buried in this country. I look forward to see who they find for next year’s Tales From The Grave. Although he is buried in Pipestone County, it would be fun to see a reenactor present my great grandfather who was a grenadier in the Prussian army and who fled Germany in 1914 after being found out by the authorities to be smuggling butter on the Hamburg wharves with his dray company.

Know any women veterans? Who of your ancestors would you like to present or see presented in a historical reenactment?

2026, animals, gardening, Gatherings, pets, Uncategorized

Peace, Love, Play

37 Comments

It has been Buffalo Days here for the past week, and there has been a car rally, a parade, a 5K run, a quilt show, a craft fair, and many food trucks around town. Yesterday was to be Woofstock, a celebration of dogs. You can see the Facebook page below listing all the activities

https://www.facebook.com/share/1AjJi3XFZN/

Our pastor was scheduled to do the blessing of the Dogs. Our terriers needed blessings as well as forgiveness and penance! Husband and I left home with the dogs at 4:30 to head to the city park, but we hadn’t gone more than a block when the sky darkened and the wind really picked up. I turned the car and headed back home just before the thunderstorm hit. We got .50 of rain in about 20 minutes. Woofstock was officially rained out. I imagined all the wet dogs that were at the park and what a chaotic scene it must have been.

All this brought up memories of the original Woodstock, and what an awful thing the grownups around me viewed the goings on at the festival. I was still in elementary school but was fascinated by the scenes I saw on TV.

I was thankful that our rain and wind weren’t destructive We won’t need to water the garden for at least a couple of days. They were expecting 85-100 mph gusts, hail, and tornadoes back at our old home in ND last night. I can’t imagine a garden making it through something like that!

Been rained out? What are your memories of Woodstock? What Woofstock activity would you have wanted to do?

2026, home, Media, Uncategorized

Nutcracker Progress

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A while back I posted about the nutcrackers in Luverne. A local retired teacher/amateur historian donated her collection of several thousand nutcrackers to the local museum. The Chamber of Commerce jumped on the idea of nutcrackers as a marketing ploy, and obtained funding to erect the world’s tallest nutcracker at the I90- Highway 75 exit. It was designed to stand more than 70 feet in the air.

After months of waiting, all the pieces of the tall nutcracker have been delivered from their manufacturer in Utah, and sufficiently high lifts have arrived to erect the pieces. I took a photo yesterday at the site:

There continues to be some mild controversy over the wisdom of the nutcracker motif as a town symbol, but many businesses on Main St. have put nutcracker placards outside their doors. The one below is outside the Green Earth Players office, a local theatre company. I think it must date from when they put on A Christmas Story.

Other entities have commissioned artists to construct nutcracker statues with different motifs around town. The one below is in honor of hunters:

Other statues honor women WWII service personnel and factory workers, as well as farmers.

As for Betty, the woman who started it it all, she is 95 and still working at the museum. Grandson and I ran into her the other week. She was somewhat in a tizzy as there were nutcrackers in storage due to getting new display cases and she was eager to get them unpacked. There are a little over 7000 at the museum now. I posted a somewhat older video to give an idea of the collection.

We haven’t any nutcracker placards or statues outside our house, but if we did, they would have to symbolize terriers or musicians.

What motif would you choose for a nutcracker placard or statue outside your house?

2026, Government, home, Uncategorized

Proud

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Husband attends a weekly men’s bible study at our church, and a man more elderly than Husband welcomed him and told him he had moved to a good county, as people here take care of each other.

I always knew that people here were good to one another, but this was really brought home to me by an article in the local paper last week that a private and county funded program was paying for outpatient mental health treatment for county residents with unaffordable deductibles or no insurance. There has been a 200% increase in residents using the program over the past year. Eligible residents only need to pay $25 per session for up to 10 sessions. As a mental health professional and county resident I am elated to hear this. I believe we will contribute to this fund.

Yesterday we attended the grand opening of the new butcher shop in town started with funds from a community group and owned and operated by the granddaughter of our former milk man. It is a wonderful place, and hundreds of people visited it and loved it.

Husband has signed up for a canoe/kayak day trip on the Rock River on June 13th sponsored by the Chamber of Comnerce. He is renting a canoe from the Chamber for the trip. The woman at the Chamber was so concerned that a canoe might be too much for him that she told him they will bring an extra kayak just in case he needs it. I am really happy we moved here!

What has your city or county done lately that makes you proud? What are your favorite charities and local help organizations?